Kuss student places third in state science fair

FALL RIVER — Fluid dynamics is an area of engineering that can often befuddle even adults who hold college degrees and have backgrounds in science.

But Cristian Hutchins, who just completed the eighth grade at Matthew J. Kuss Middle School, appears have the concept behind it down pat.

Hutchins demonstrated the knowledge he acquired through conducting experiments and research. He sought to investigate what kind of impact the diameter of propellers would have on the speed of a remote controlled boat, as it moved through water. Hutchins presented his project at multiple science fairs, including one at Kuss, where he placed first; a regional science fair at Bristol Community College; and then the state middle school science and engineering fair held June 7 at Worcester Technical High School, where he earned third place honors, out of 273 projects.

For those experiments Hutchins used a one-foot-long boat, a stopwatch, ruler, a saw and measuring tape.

Hutchins said originally he wanted to look at aircraft, but determined there would be “too many variables.” So he settled on the boat as his subject, and eventually found that propeller diameter did indeed affect its speed. Smaller blades slowed the boat down “a little,” he said.

The pond at Bristol Community College’s Fall River campus served as the site for the experiment. Hutchins said he conducted multiple test runs there over the course of a few weekends last November. His father, Charles Hutchins, assisted by using a stopwatch to record the time it took for the vessel to traverse the pond.

During the vessel’s last run, it sank, but Hutchins still had the data he recorded.

“It’s a college level subject,” Charles Hutchins said. “We didn’t help him that much. Except I had the stopwatch.”

Kuss science teacher Sarah Chapin said judges at the school were impressed by how articulate Hutchins was in conveying his project’s findings.

“He was able to impress an engineer,” Chapin said.

Hutchins demonstrated that he not only personally understood the concepts, but was in turn able to communicate them to people who do not have engineering and physics as their backgrounds.

It boils down to underwater aerodynamics, using math and physics to calculate how an object would move through a liquid, such as water. Hutchins said he did the math to determine the boat’s speed — distance divided by time — but there is even more advanced math involved in fluid dynamics. He stuck to the field’s “general principles.”

Charles Hutchins noted that while at the state fair, his son was among a group “of very accomplished kids.”

Cristian Hutchins said it was an honor to be in that group.

“The main goal is to get kids excited while they are in middle school, before they turn off to science,” said Sandy Mayrand, the chair of the Massachusetts Middle School Science and Engineering Fair.

More than 300 students from middle schools around Massachusetts participated.

“It’s the largest year we’ve had,” Mayrand said, adding that the annual fair is in its 17th year.

“Every year they see the projects get more creative,” Mayrand said.

Projects were scored based on the following criteria: whether students followed the scientific method or engineering design process, their knowledge of the subject the projects investigated, their process, a record of whtat they did for their project as well as a journal of the project “from beginning to end,” Mayrand said.

The fair also offers students some exposure to the science profession — the opportunity to share their findings with science and engineering professionals, and to see the work that their peers from around the state have done, Mayrand explained.

They also get to interact with their peers.

“What the judges really pick up on is there are some students who just can talk about their projects and have a conversation with the judges. This is the first time kids actually talk about what they’ve done.”

“He’s a great kid,” said Matthew Silva, the vice principal for Kuss’s eighth grade class.

Hutchins, who now has a trophy as a symbol of his work, will attend B.M.C. Durfee High School this fall. He said he will be taking a class in the school’s new Project Lead The Way program, which seeks to expose students to engineering fields.

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